The initial public offering of Asia’s oldest stock exchange, BSE, will open for subscription on January 23, 2017, and will remain open till January 25, according to its red herring prospectus.

The issue is an offer-for-sale of over 1.54 crore shares of face value ₹2 each. About 28.26 per cent stake of the bourse will change hands and there would be no capital infusion into the stock exchange as existing investors are selling out. The issue size is expected to be between ₹1,200-1,300 crore and as many as 302 entities are offering their shares for sale. Singapore Exchange, Atticus Mauritius, Quantum (m) and Citigroup Global Markets are completely divesting their stakes, while others such as GKFF Ventures, Acacia Banyan Partners, Caldwell India Holdings and Bajaj Holdings are partly divesting their stakes.

May rope in anchors Of the total number of shares being offered for sale, the institutional investor (qualified institutional buyer or QIB) portion consists of a maximum of over 77.13 lakh equity shares, the HNI portion (non-institutional investor) portion is a minimum of 23.14 lakh shares and the retail portion a minimum of 53.99 lakh shares. The BSE may consider roping in anchor investors, the bidding date for whom would be January 20, 2017 — one working day prior to the offer opening day.

The bourse would be listed on the NSE. According to SEBI’s Stock Exchange and Clearing Corporation regulations, exchanges cannot list on themselves and, in addition, shareholders of the exchange are required to be ‘fit and proper’.

Edelweiss, Axis Capital, Jefferies and Nomura are the global book-runners to the issue while Motilal Oswal, SBI Capital Markets, and SMC Capital are domestic book-runners. Spark Capital is the co-book runner to the issue. The registrar to the issue is Karvy Computershare.

NSE IPO Meanwhile, rival NSE filed draft papers with SEBI last month, and is awaiting the regulator’s nod to launch the issue. Currently, Multi Commodity Exchange of India is the lone listed bourse in the country. The MCX IPO, floated at an issue price of ₹1,032 a share in 2012, was subscribed over 54 times. The exchange had raised about ₹660 crore.

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